BYU statement

“Physics professor Steven Jones has made numerous statements about the collapse of the World Trade Center. BYU has repeatedly said that it does not endorse assertions made by individual faculty. We are, however, concerned about the increasingly speculative and accusatory nature of these statements by Dr. Jones. Furthermore, BYU remains concerned that Dr. Jones’ work on this topic has not been published in appropriate scientific venues. Owing to these issues, as well as others, the university has placed Dr. Jones on leave while we continue to review these matters.”

The NIST should at the very least propose a quantitative expression showing that the total available collapse energy was in fact greater that the available resistive strain energy. See Ross and Greenings Papers.

To understand the improbability of complete collapse consider a paper presented by LU Xinzheng & JIANG Jianjing (Department of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing), presented Nov. 2002. These engineers did in fact show that they could create a dynamic finite element model that showed that the Towers would have sustained total global collapse. BUT, they had to heat the steal to 700 deg C to do it. The NIST indicates that the steel was 300 deg C max and only in one isolated area of the South Tower, the North tower was more like 200 deg C max. The NIST could not justify these high temperatures (used by LU and JIANG) based on their thermodynamic modeling so they had to introduce arbitrary forces “pulling” on the perimeter columns. Apparently the core columns warped in such a way that they could exert this pulling force!

Sorry I’m getting carried away…

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/fires.html

The One Meridian Plaza Fire
One Meridian Plaza is a 38-floor skyscraper in Philadelphia that suffered a severe fire on February 23, 1991. The fire started on the 22nd floor and raged for 18 hours, gutting eight floors and causing an estimated $100 million in direct property loss. 1 Â 2 Â 3 Â It was later described by Philadelphia officials as “the most significant fire in this century”.

The fire caused window breakage, cracking of granite, and failures of spandrel panel connections. 4 Â Despite the severity and duration of the fire, as evidenced by the damage the building sustained, no part of the building collapsed.
The First Insterstate Bank fire

The First Interstate Bank Fire
The First Interstate Bank Building is a 62-story skyscraper in Los Angeles that suffered the worst high-rise fire in the city’s history. From the late evening of May 4, 1988 through the early morning of the next day, 64 fire companies battled the blaze, which lasted for 3 1/2 hours. The fire caused extensive window breakage, which complicated firefighting efforts. Large flames jutted out of the building during the blaze. Firefighting efforts resulted in massive water damage to floors below the fire, and the fire gutted offices from the 12th to the 16th floor, and caused extensive smoke damage to floors above. The fire caused an estimated $200 million in direct property loss. 5 Â

Not only did they not contain the fires, but apparently the sprinkler system wasn’t working well that day.

“It takes approx. 2 weeks to fully wire a bldg. for demolition.”

I think Prof. Jones makes the assertion, though I believe he may have been talking about WTC 1&2, that the charges could’ve been placed by as few as ten men.